Home for the Haunting(58)

“Oh, good heavens, no! Dave may have been dealing drugs, and he was running wild, but he has a good heart. I go visit him a few times a year, just to keep connected.”

“Visit him? In San Quentin?”

“When I go up to the firing range. It’s right there.”

“The firing range is right next to the prison? Doesn’t that seem . . . dangerous?”

“I don’t see why. A lot of the guards practice there.” Etta smiled and leaned toward me conspiratorially. “I’d wanted to go inside San Quentin prison for years. I was dying of curiosity, driving past it all the time. Is that terrible of me to say? When I’d heard that Dave was there, I thought I should go visit, for old times’ sake. The cards were stacked against him from the start. Another kind of family, things would have been very different for him. He was always decent to me, caring in his own way. I can’t blame young people for the sins of their fathers.”

“Speaking of fathers . . . do you think Dave’s father, Joe, could have done it?”

“Joe might just have been mean enough to go after the Lawrences, especially after the house burned. But frankly, he was so far gone by then, I don’t think he could have managed. He had jaundice, the shakes, the whole nine yards. He passed away from liver failure not three months later.”

• • •



I called Inspector Crawford to see if she had an update on Linda’s case that she was willing to share with me and, more to the point, whether we were officially allowed to go back in the yard to finish the job on the weekend. The kind folks who had volunteered—including the fraternity boys—should have as much notice as possible; they hadn’t signed up for two weekends in a row, after all. Plus, we needed to arrange for yet another Port o’ Potty and Dumpster, and make sure the insurance was still in place.

“Yes, I’ll be releasing the scene today. You are free to go back to work on Monty’s house any time. In fact, that girl we caught? What was it, Crow?”

“Raven.”

“Right. Knew it was a black bird of some type. Anyway, I scared her and told her she had to do community service with you at Monty’s house tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I just got off the phone with Monty—he said you said you’d be working there tomorrow afternoon.”

“I mentioned it was a possibility, but I didn’t promise . . .”

“How about you make it happen? I figured maybe Raven would learn a thing or two about giving back to her neighbors; I even told her she’d get extra credit for any other juvenile delinquents she might drag along with her, so with luck you might have a few volunteers of the Goth variety working with you. Let me know if she shows up, will you? Hope that’s okay.”

Funny thing about people who didn’t manage volunteers was that they always assumed the more volunteers the better, which was actually almost never the case. If volunteers had no skills, much less a willingness to work, they were far more trouble than they were worth. Still, I reminded myself, a big part of the Neighbors Together philosophy was training people in basic skills and, like Annette pointed out, teaching them how good it could feel to contribute to their communities.

“Okay, I’ll keep an eye out for her and any hooligan friends who might show up. Thanks.”

“Also . . . this is a little . . . unconventional, but would you like to go talk to a man in Martinez with me this afternoon?”

“Um . . . what kind of man?”

“The original inspector on the Lawrence family murders.”

“Does he have information pertinent to Linda’s death?”

“Not sure. That’s why I wanted to talk with him. It’s a long shot, but listening to his memories of the case might trigger something. You never know.”

“This is one of the stranger things I’ve heard myself say . . . but yes, I’d love to go to Martinez to talk to a man about a mass murder. Thank you for thinking of me.”

We agreed to meet at three at the Fourth Street parking lot in Berkeley. In the meantime, since I hadn’t had much luck getting through to a human at Neighbors Together on the phone, I decided to stop by the office and let the staff know, in person, what had happened last weekend and about the change in plans.





Chapter Fifteen




There is something decidedly undignified about a grown woman begging for a Port o’ Potty.

“I’m sorry, Mel,” said Jennifer, the largely ineffectual director of the program. “But our budget just doesn’t extend to—”

“I understand, Jennifer; I got that part the first couple of times.” I knew she was vastly underpaid and even more well meaning—and I sure as heck didn’t want her job—so I was trying to rein in my impatience. “But as you know, we didn’t use up the entire weekend, so surely there was some leftover time? How can I finish up the project without a Dumpster and a Port o’ Potty?”